During last night’s vice-presidential debate Mike Pence told Kamala Harris she could have her opinions but not her facts. Some context. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late Democratic senator from New York, is credited with saying “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” I so love this quote I use it as a tagline on my personal email. It’s a guiding principle in my work as a journalist (and also a favorite rejoinder in casual debate). Moynihan was from a bygone era when intellectualism and Big Ideas were thought of as attributes in our statesmen (and back then they were mostly men). Another of Moynihan’s famous concepts was “defining deviancy down,” in which worse and worse behavior comes to be accepted as the norm. Both the Left and the Right quote the 1993 essay to argue their cases for the causes of crime and the fracturing of the American family. More recently, pundits reference Moynihan to argue the Trump administration’s rampant lying, greed, race-baiting and tweet storms are a new low in American politics. Moynihan strongly opposed a growing lack of transparency in government, laying out his argument in Secrecy: The American Experience. He was a sociologist and a conservative who served as a Democratic senator and as an adviser to four presidents, including Richard Nixon. That kind of bipartisanship is from another time. In a 2003 memorandum written the month he died, Moynihan summed up his central view of society and culture:

In some 40 years of government work I have learned one thing for certain. As I have put it, the central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. Thanks to this interaction, we’re a better society in nearly all respects than we were.